Janine Jackson interviewed Alice O’Connor on the politics of the War on Poverty for the September 30, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The new census data show the steepest one-year decline in the US poverty rate in decades. The dip from 14.8 percent to 13.5 percent was widely heralded, if some did indicate that declarations like the New York Times’ “Millions in US Climb Out of Poverty at Long Last” might be overblown. The rate was 11.3 percent in 2000, after all, and the gains aren’t evenly spread around, or necessarily sustainable.
When corporate media talk about poverty, this is often what it looks like. “Experts” talk about what amount and sorts of resources it “makes sense” to allow people to have before they’re eligible for what amount or sort of assistance from the state, and how tweaks to those rules may affect the overall number of people who qualify to be labeled poor.
This media focus is, to good extent, a reflection of that of policymakers, and of poverty researchers. But our next guest suggests we could be having a different conversation, and history may help us have it. Alice O’Connor is professor of history and director of graduate studies at the University of California/Santa Barbara, and author of, among other titles, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century US History. She joins us now by phone from California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Alice O’Connor.
Alice O’Connor: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
In thinking about the context for the new poverty data, I came across an essay you wrote two years ago on the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, and there was a lot in it that I didn’t know. We often hear that the War on Poverty didn’t work, because people are still poor. But you can’t measure the impacts of an initiative if you’re not clear on what its actual goals were. So not only because it’s been misrepresented, but because it’s so relevant, take us back…